The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

“Stealing Intellectual Property” is Fake News

Trump uses the fake news of “intellectual property theft” to justify his tariff war on China. He boasts that he is going to stop the Chinese stealing that victimizes Americans. In yet another way, he will be the savior of Americans’ economic future, a savior who needs/deserves their votes and donations. He takes his cues from the televangelists.

The
second reason for Trump’s tariff war on China is that it serves a
useful political purpose for Trump/GOP posturing. (Photo: Thomas
Peter-Pool/Getty Images)
The claim that the Chinese are stealing our intellectual property –
chiefly production technologies – is largely bogus. Yet many are duped.
All economic development across the millennia has included the
dissemination of new technologies from those who have them to those who
want them. The dissemination works via buying and selling products,
copying production processes and products, sharing production
facilities, exchanging access to resources and markets for access to
technology, and yes, no doubt, some downright stealing too.
Disseminators include workers and bosses, merchants and manufacturers,
students and professors, journalists and politicians, and just plain
travelers.
Often, when those who want another’s technology get it, they
develop it further, whereupon the developed technology in turn gets
disseminated elsewhere (likely including back to where it originally
came from). Greece disseminated technology to Rome, Rome to middle
Europe, Europe to America, and yes America to Asia among countless other
disseminations, past and present. Recently, the Rolls-Royce luxury car
company’s CEO attacked Aston-Martin and other companies for stealing
their concepts. A few decades ago, the cry went up in the US about
Japanese stealing our technology. More decades back, the US stole
technology from Great Britain accordingto the British.
Demagogues, especially the nationalist variety, try to make
political capital out of recycling stories of awful “foreigners
stealing” our technologies. It allows them profitably to pretend that
they can “protect the nation and its economy.” Dissemination happens,
one way or the other, and never more easily than now with the global
internet, world trade, and jet travel. The fakery of proclaiming against
it has never been more glaring.
It has always been a presumption of most economics that
dissemination of intellectual property (more or less open flows of new
products and technologies) is good for economic development everywhere.
The copyrights, patents, and trademarks that block dissemination all
have limits: they expire after a time, they only block copies not
variations, and so on. Those limits are a recognition that the spreading
of knowledge – intellectual property – should be enabled and
encouraged.

Capitalist enterprises routinely buy, study, and copy parts of other
companies’ products, especially those of their successful competitors.
Economic theories stress that often such replication of successful
competitors’ products and technologies is how enterprises survive. It is
a regular part of capitalist competition and serves a social purpose of
lowering average costs of production and thus prices to consumers.
Within today’s world economy, capitalist enterprises in less
developed economies confront a choice. They can use an inferior
technology to produce commodities to sell in their own markets as
“infant industries” protected from global competition. Their commodities
will be inferior to and/or more expensive than their excluded
competitors’. That is one possible development path. An alternative path
offers to share the local market and local resources (especially cheap
labor) with foreign competitors in exchange for sharing (gaining access
to) the latter’s superior technology. If that offer to share is mutually
profitable, a deal may be struck. For demagogues later to refer to such
arrangements as “stealing” is, to be extremely polite, a
misrepresentation.
US universities have for years faced a crisis of dwindling numbers
of US students applying for graduate work. The cause was and is
shrinking job opportunities for new PhDs (as US colleges and
universities shifted to hiring cheap adjuncts instead). Many
universities sought and welcomed paying Chinese students whose arrival
kept graduate programs afloat. During the years that such students spent
in US universities, their teachers, fellow students, studies, and
travels provided all sorts of access to “intellectual property” in the
US. Neither Mr Trump nor anyone else can know what bits of knowledge
were in any meaningful sense “stolen” as opposed to learned, shared,
read in professional journals, acquired through lab experiments, etc.
The narrow, legal usage of ‘Intellectual property theft” – such as
violating copyright, patent, or similar protections of idea, concepts,
products, etc. – is a problem at least as old as capitalism itself. Such
violations exist everywhere, inside and outside the US, and are
prosecuted in courts around the world all the time. We do not know
whether China experiences such violations, on a per capita basis, more
than other countries or more vis-à-vis US intellectual property than
that of other countries. Thus the application of even the narrow legal
meaning of intellectual property theft term to China’s behavior is not
warranted.
Suppose finally that Trump’s tariff war succeeds in somehow
blocking China from acquiring US intellectual property. That will
provide incentives for China to (1) make more deals with non-US
companies, (2) further and more quickly develop its own intellectual
property and block the US from it, and (3) deny US firms access to the
Chinese market and to Chinese laborers because China’s access to US
firms’ technology is blocked. Such steps all carry costs and risks for
US companies and the US economy now and in the future. Moreover, it is
highly likely that the US’s blocking efforts will fail to reach their
objective. Too many avenues for transmission of intellectual property
will still be active, officially and unofficially, formally and
informally, legally and illegally.

We are left with the question: why then pursue a strategy of trade
wars to block intellectual property theft if it is mostly fake news? The
answer has two parts. First, the accusation of intellectual property
theft (often paired with “forced technology transfer”) amounts to a
demand for better terms of access for US firms who want to produce
and/or sell in China. If they must share their technology, for example,
they want bigger shares of profitable joint ventures, etc. The Trump
tariff war aims to coerce better terms from China for US companies
active there. Trump expects and gets approval from US companies so long
as they believe they may gain more from concessions forced on China than
they lose from tariff-caused disruptions of their currently profitable
global supply chains
The second reason for Trump’s tariff war on China is that it serves
a useful political purpose for Trump/GOP posturing. The simple logical
story runs as follows: America’s “greatness” was undone by bad deals
made by establishment politicians in the past. These allowed the Chinese
(and others) to take advantage of the US by means of intellectual
property theft. Trump is putting an end to that theft by his
headline-dominating tariff wars. Thereby America will become great
again. And perhaps China, after 20 years of spectacular economic growth,
will be “contained,” in the arrogant jargon right-wing pundits like to
indulge.
This logic is neatly packaged and promoted politically. Integrated
with big budget outlays for the military, big tax cuts for corporations
and the rich, and big proclamations of patriotic chauvinism, the
integrated package may suffice to win elections in 2018 and 2020. But
the fakery of intellectual property theft accusations will be exposed,
as it has in the past, and likely soon. The accumulating chickens of
multiple false accusations will then come home to roost. A personally
enriched Trump can then retire to Mar a Lago.